Jeb Bush suggests he would back mandatory backdoors in encryption if elected president

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush would order technology companies to build backdoors into encryption and give the federal government special access to users data if elected, he said during Thursday night’s primary debate.

Asked about the cybersecurity challenges faced by the United States, Bush said the Obama administration has “failed us completely” and called cyber issues “the first priority.”

Bush then laid out the beginnings of a strategy to implement backdoors into American encryption.

Encryption is code that scrambles data so only the intended recipients of data can receive it. It plays a crucial role in Internet activities like browsing the Web, reading email, engaging in online commerce, and communicating.

“There needs to be complete dialogue with large technology companies. They understand there’s a national security risk.”

Fox Business host and debate moderator Neil Cavuto said that Apple CEO Tim Cook would not reveal private data by inserting backdoors into Apple devices and asked if Bush, as president, would order Cook and other tech executives to do so.

“There needs to be complete dialogue with large technology companies. They understand there’s a national security risk,” Bush said. “We ought to give them a little bit of liability relief, so if they share data amongst themselves and share data with the federal government, they’re not fearful of a lawsuit.”

“Because this is a hugely important issue,” he explained. “You can encrypt messages. ISIS can, over these platforms and we have no ability to have a cooperative relationship…”

Bush noted that people might simply adopt foreign products were U.S. firms forced to compromise their encryption for law enforcement purposes. Since “we also want to dominate this from a commercial side, there’s a lot of balanced interests,” Bush said.

Bush didn’t explain how he would prevent companies outside the U.S. from taking American business by offering strong encryption without backdoors. Both the French and Dutch governments recently came out against backdoors, which a consensus of technologists say will create insecurity and violate privacy.

The Bush campaign did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.